Transgender Women Fear Abuse in Immigration Detention

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Nina Chaubal, left, and her wife, Greta Martela, run Trans Lifeline, a hotline for transgender people. Ms. Chaubal was held for four days in the Eloy Detention Center in Arizona.CreditCreditCaitlin O'Hara for The New York Times

PHOENIX — Nina Chaubal and her wife, Greta Martela, thought about going through the Rocky Mountains on their way to Chicago from San Diego late last month, but did not want to risk getting caught in a snowstorm. So they drove south through Arizona, where Ms. Chaubal, an Indian national with an invalid work visa, fell into the hands of the Border Patrol.

Ms. Chaubal, 25, was not worried about deportation when she arrived at the Eloy Detention Center, a privately run immigration jail 80 miles southeast of Phoenix and several hours away from the Border Patrol checkpoint where she had been stopped.

But as a transgender woman, she said she was afraid of what could happen to her while in custody.

She and Ms. Martela, who is also transgender, had heard enough stories to have reason for concern — about transgender women kept in isolation or housed in men’s units, where sexual assault is not uncommon and harassment is routine, according to numerous accounts published by Human Rights Watch last year.

As she stepped inside the jail on Dec. 30, Ms. Chaubal said she wondered, “Is this what’s waiting for me?”

By then, Ms. Martela, 47, had mobilized a small army of supporters through Facebook, tapping into the network she and Ms. Chaubal had built in the three years since they started Trans Lifeline, a crisis hotline for transgender individuals.

The supporters raised more than $10,000 to help pay Ms. Chaubal’s $4,500 bond and for legal defense and urged one another to call Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency in charge of immigrants’ detention and deportation.

Ms. Chaubal, a former software engineer for Google, resumed her trip to Chicago as soon as she was released from Eloy, four days after her arrival. She walked out “feeling privileged to be able to get out so quickly, and in one piece,” she said in an interview.

Others have not been so fortunate. Karyna Jaramillo, a transgender woman from Mexico living in Phoenix without authorization, spent nearly two weeks among male detainees in Eloy in 2015, so fearful for her safety that she said she considered suicide.

No one abused her, she said through tears. “But the emotional trauma, I’ll never forget.”

Hers is a familiar narrative, said Aaron C. Morris, executive director of Immigration Equality, a nonprofit group that provides free legal representation to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender persons. About half of the group’s clients indicate that they were threatened with sexual assault or were sexually assaulted while in immigration detention, he said.

“The abuse, the mistreatment, they are not aberrations,” Mr. Morris said.

The question of how to best protect transgender women in immigration detention has confounded federal authorities for some time. In 2011, Immigration and Customs Enforcement — known by its acronym, ICE — for the first time recognized transgender detainees as a vulnerable population, albeit a small one. According to statistics provided by the agency to The New York Times, among the approximately 41,000 immigrants in custody on Tuesday, 53 identified as transgender.

There are guidelines to allow transgender detainees to continue their hormone treatments and be placed in units based on the gender they identify with.

A memo in 2015 stipulated other protections, like a system to identify detainees’ gender identity that should inform where and how they are detained and the type of medical care they may receive.

ICE has also moved to house transgender men and women in a dedicated unit at the city jail in Santa Ana, Calif., which had 36 detainees on Tuesday, and at a new facility that is scheduled to open this month in Alvarado, Tex., south of Fort Worth. The goal, an agency official said, is to concentrate a small population in places that can offer specific services and shield them from abuse. (After public pressure, including a hunger strike, the Santa Ana City Council voted to stop holding immigration detainees in the city jail by June 30, 2020.)

While acknowledging the changes, lawyers and advocates say mistreatment and abuse endure. A client of Immigration Equality told her lawyers that she was assaulted in the Hudson County Correctional Facility in Kearny, N.J., on Dec. 21 and was transferred to another detention center in the state afterward, Mr. Morris said.

Jennicet Gutiérrez, a community organizer at Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement, a grass-roots group based in Los Angeles, said that despite the mandatory training of guards at the Santa Ana jail, some transgender women are told to “act male” and are often addressed using male pronouns.

“There’s still a lot of training that’s necessary for them to overcome the deep lack of knowledge and understanding about our community and treat us with dignity and respect,” said Ms. Gutiérrez, who is transgender.

Many transgender men and women flee to the United States in search of protection from torture, sexual violence and other types of persecution in their home countries.

That is why Ms. Jaramillo, a director at Trans Queer Pueblo in Phoenix, said she left Mexico. She did not, however, petition for asylum. (She said she was not aware it was an option.) She said she landed in immigration detention after a drunken-driving arrest by the local police.

Ms. Chaubal came to the United States as a foreign student. According to her LinkedIn profile, she got a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2012.

She met Ms. Martela, a contract software engineer at the time, while working for Google. They married in San Francisco in the spring of 2015, just before they moved to Chicago to work on Trans Lifeline full time, Ms. Chaubal said.

Ms. Chaubal said she had been working on completing her application to adjust her immigration status when she was detained.

She always carries her Illinois driver’s license when she travels. That is the document she showed to the Border Patrol agent who stopped their van at the checkpoint near Yuma, Ariz., on Dec. 28.

“It’s one thing if I had left the country and crossed into Mexico,” Ms. Chaubal said. “But I’m in California, driving down the interstate. There’s this checkpoint in front of us and everything changes.”

From the checkpoint, one of dozens the Border Patrol operates along the United States’s southern and northern borders, Ms. Chaubal was taken to two Border Patrol stations, and then to Eloy, where she stayed for four days.

“What would have happened if we hadn’t been able to mobilize so many people, get a lawyer, raise money?” Ms. Martela said. “What if we didn’t have the connections that we do?”

Correction:Jan. 10, 2017

An earlier version of this article misstated the number of immigrants in custody who identified as transgender and misstated the day of that census. It was 53, not 54, and the information was current as of Tuesday, not Thursday.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A9 of the New York edition with the headline: Transgender Women Fear Mistreatment and Abuse in Immigration Detention. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe